


like smoke, like sunlight

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action, Angst, Bittersweet, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 06:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5857690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Bull's lived for days with the smell of distant brine in his nose and the creaks of a humid wildwood a continent away in his ears.</i>
</p><p>The Exalted Plains make Bull uneasy. Dorian inadvertently makes it worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like smoke, like sunlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [auntshoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/auntshoe/gifts).



> A late celebratory story for the darling auntshoe ♥
> 
> Also there now exists art by the inestimable serenity-fails, which you can find [here](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com/post/160740103971). :D
> 
> (Also also, I know Andrastians primarily cremate their dead, go with it, there's a story reason why I fudged the lore.)

  
_Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,_  
_there is a field. I'll meet you there. --_

*

The Exalted Plains are a weary grind.

Orlesian soldiers in two colours huddle in their outposts against the tide of spirits that wear the meat of their former fellows. Villages burn because someone spoke the wrong name where an advance scout could hear it. In the hidden glens of the river valley, Dalish elves in rattling aravels twist and duck through through the lines of the armies _and_ the rifts gaping everywhere.

Toss in the Freemen coming north from the Emerald Graves, and the whole mess starts to look familiar.

Bull's seen his share of shit since joining up with the Inquisition. The world's buckling, but their needs are mortal and material. However impressive, the recently reclaimed Skyhold is a shambles, and fixing the rifts on the Plains will win them goodwill and support.

It'll also let Celene and Gaspard's armies back at each other's throats, unless the Inquisitor's charm bites deep enough to make them reconsider.

The Inquisitor's charm flags by the day, with each new smoking ruin or Fade-warped path they cross. Sera's gone off her food; if nothing else, that'd convince Bull that things are bad. For his part, Dorian keeps up a facile front, always quick with an amusing anecdote from his youth in Tevinter, clever and faraway enough to lift their mood.

"Village ahead," Sera says, scampering back into the lee of a towering rock, where they stopped for a rest. In the craggy terrain they're more nimble walking than riding. Their supply wagons trundle behind. Lavellan felt it was imperative they seal the rifts as fast as possible, and so they're only the four of them, with shortening provisions and ragged spirits.

"Does one dare hope there's an intact roof to be found for the night?" Dorian glances to the sky, where a summer storm is brewing.

"Picked clean as an arl's rubbish heap." Sera takes the waterskin that Bull hands her, quaffs sharply. "Birds and soldiers on the job. All's quiet, though."

"It should be this one." Lavellan shakes out a map of the region, from before the war reached it. The settlements marked with tiny houses, the forts drawn in red and river branches in green, look perversely peaceful on the vellum. "Harding was supposed to meet us there."

"We better pick up the pace." Reclaiming the skin, Bull tucks it into his pack. "That rain will wreck Dorian's hair."

"You say that as if the week of sleeping rough had left anything to salvage." Dorian pulls up his hood, all ruffled dignity. Bull shoves him in the shoulder so he teeters. Looking on, Lavellan lets up a snippet of a laugh.

"If you two are done?"

"Let's go, boss."

Dorian grumbles under his breath all the way to the bottom of the hill. It lightens Bull's step, if only a bit.

A dirt road winds up to the village from the west, while they close in from the south. Climbing fences and leaping ditches, they cross a breadth of ripening wheat towards the village. Glazed white tiles on shattered window-frames and above gaping doors catch the sunlight.

"There's graves behind a house," Sera volunteers. The village looks to have no chantry, so it likely has no proper memorial grove or cemetery. "Fresh ones. Still frigging smelled the earth."

Bull never forgets she's little more than half his age. No excuse, that--he took on Gatt when Gatt was fifteen--but it explains, sometimes.

No fire has been used here. Looting deserters or Freemen, in a haste to be away?

"Survivors burying their dead," Bull puts in. No time, then, for building and burning pyres, and no stomach for leaving the dead untended. "Hope they went east and not north." In the east, the Inquisition is hanging banners along the Path of Flame. It's a flimsy pledge of peace, but it's a shout in the face of chaos. They just need to be able to back it up.

They approach the village commons, the well with its chained bucket smashed on the ground, when green spiders and slashes through the air.

The rift tears open right in their midst. Any chance to sketch a strategy is gone in that instant.

"Get back, get back!" Lavellan waves her arm as her other hand scrabbles for her staff.

The hood of Bull's axe snags on the blade, and he wrenches it off with a snarl of irritation. If old fears haunt his steps, could they at least spook him into keeping his weapon ready while in unknown terrain?

This wasn't. Sera scouted ahead for that purpose.

She screams as a terror grapples her to the ground in a flurry of gnashing talons. In a few strides, Bull seizes a gauntleted grip of the demon and flings it back with main force. From the corner of his eye he sees a web of incandescent light snake out from where Dorian stands: the cleansing glyph consumes the next two terrors as soon as their feet strike the dirt.

Dorian groans with the effort, then falls onto Lavellan's left. Ice crackling in the focus stone of her staff, she smashes it into the maw of a rage demon and earns a smouldering gouge down her forearm. The scorched leather gives off a waft of acrid stink.

Bull puts his axe through the terror, enough time for Sera to regain her footings, just as Dorian cries out, urgent, "Arcane horror!"

"Oh, crap." The blighted Freemen must've had an apostate. The corpse stirring by one of the houses bears no resemblance to a living person anymore. The spirit warps and moulds it to its liking.

Just then, the rift belches forth a burst of energy tendrils. Bull catches Lavellan as she staggers, both hands braced to throw up a barrier. All blood has fled her face.

"Shite, frig, piss," Sera gasps. Her drawn arrow seeks the horror, even shaking on the aim. "Hammer there, anvil here. Anyone got a way _out_?"

She gets two shafts in the bent, tattered body before the horror hurls a fireball into their defensive huddle. Grabbing Dorian by the back of his robes, Bull pulls them both low at the telltale rush of air towards the nexus of the spell. Lavellan's barrier deflects the worst of the flames, but by the time they die down, the rift fluxes again.

"Bull?" comes Lavellan's voice. She sounds surreally far away. That's probably the rift's doing.

"Still alive!" he calls back. Dorian tugs him towards the meagre shelter of the well's stone rim. More terrors shiver into being under the convulsing green light.

"So are we! I'm going to draw the horror away, you deal with the rest!"

"Boss--"

It's a madcap plan. The demon will be beckoned by her mage's power, the promise of a new host stronger than the present one. But if she's overwhelmed--

"Let her do it." Dorian has a hard gleam in his eye. "I can even our odds."

Dorian's solution is likely to make his skin crawl, but Bull only nods. Shit, it'll be nice variety to have the rambling corpses be on their side.

Air whistles on the other side of the commons, the horror shifting through the Fade. Bull catches the dash of familiar feet on the grass, the scorch-snap of lightning. The four terrors veer towards the noise as one.

He can only make the most of a shit situation. "Hey, assholes!" 

The first terror breaks in half with a satisfying, chitinous crunch. When he parries the second with his axe haft and kicks it away, an arrow whirrs in from the right to punch into its malformed head. Sera balances on a broken wall, nocking the next shaft. "Got your back!"

Until one of the demons flits up on top of her. They won't if he's swift enough. Dorian murmurs in Tevene behind him, and the air around him fills with the smell of unseen smoke.

Then a terror rips into Bull's left shoulder, its approach at an angle that blocks Sera from shooting it. Bellowing to match its glass-splitting screech, he sloughs it off and swings wildly to keep it at bay. That goes well until the second remaining one seizes its chance: flailing, knifing limbs grab onto him from his blind side, and the demon's keening sticks to his ears like a burr in wool.

He feels a strap of his armour slip free under the furious scrabbling of the terror. Blood wells, warm and red and his own. His limbs feel leaden, like he were trying to wield a boulder instead of the greataxe.

"Get _off_ him!"

Sera more collides with the demon, her dagger plunging into its back with a wet _schlick_ noise. Wrenching the blade back, she stabs it hilt-deep again while Bull straightens himself. His strength slides back like a bucket of water upended over his head.

That's how they get you. Not with fangs or claws--by eeling into your mind.

There's one demon. Before he lost track, there were two. Plus the arcane horror.

The second terror shambles towards the well, and Dorian's name breaks from Bull's mouth in too-late warning.

Movement shimmers at the edge of his vision as he rushes uselessly towards Dorian's puny hiding place. They close in as a bedraggled troop, covered in damp earth, muttering through breathless throats. No weapons, no mail, but the clothes they wore when the Freemen struck.

Bull watches a corpse in grimy red skirts lunge at the demon, bare fingers climbing along its sculpted leg. It grabs the body and tosses it aside, but that buys Dorian time to surge up from the cover of the well and crack the terror's face with the rivets of his staff.

Bile churns in Bull's throat. _Whatever works_ , he'd tell his men, in another life. _Stealth, sword, sabotage. We get it done._

"Oh, pissing void," Sera chokes out behind him.

The warm whorl of a barrier spell brushes against his nape. Its source is less heartening: Lavellan, trailing crimson to the ground, slumps against the corner of a house. "Watch out--"

A wind licks across the commons as the arcane horror bursts back into the fray. Fire dances in its skeletal fingers.

"Fuck," Bull snaps to himself. _Whatever works._ "Dorian, distract the damn thing! Boss, don't move an inch, that rift needs closing!"

Heaving a breath into his lungs, he hurries to finish the terror that Dorian knocked to the ground. Past him, the corpses Dorian raised pile onto the horror like so much kindling for its spellfire. They cling with hands and teeth to its sinewy limbs. It tears one off, and the next one dives at it. Some remnant of the mage's need to focus must hinder it, because it thrashes and seethes with unspent magic but can't shift away.

Under cover of that straggling charge, Sera breaks from the melee and switches back to her bow. Dorian follows her, striving to reach the exhausted Lavellan. Bull ignores the burn in his muscles and the deeper ache under his ribs.

He wades into the swath of slain villagers to sink his axe into the horror, over and over, until it falls into dust.

Braced against Dorian, Lavellan points the mark at the rift, and scours the sickly green air back into the dull shades of late afternoon.

Dorian leads her to sit on a stone bench beside a house. A few sprigs of prophet's laurel hang drying in an open window behind the bench, dousing the air with incongruous sweetness. The demon husks will fade, but the commons is still littered with bodies. The long, loosened braid of a girl, not yet tied in a kerchief. The hunched back of an old man, first laid open by a Freeman's sword.

Nothing Bull hasn't seen before.

"Going to check the road," Sera says, muted and snappish at once. "Harding's late."

"Please be careful." Lavellan's cut open the leg of her breeches, and is pressing linen onto a glancing rake from an ice spell. Sera nods, hard. Self-blame, there. She didn't spot the rift. Bull doesn't want to think of her finding it alone.

Once she's gone, Dorian clears his throat. "We should make a pyre."

Lavellan begins, "When Harding gets here--"

"They _were_ buried." Bull hears his own voice, a smothered growl. Shit. "By somebody that had too little time for it."

"I'd have taken our fallen enemies, gladly." Dorian swipes a hand down his dusty cheek. "The demon beat me to the punch."

"Yeah," Bull says. "They weren't red templars or fucking Venatori. Anyone ever run you by the basics, 'Vint? About how we tell who the bad guys are?"

An iron band of tension runs down his neck. The flash in Dorian's eyes only stiffens it. "By their garish costumes and villainous laughter, naturally."

And Bull should know better.

"They're _not_ the poor assholes trying to live in the middle of this mess!" His gauntlet rasps with the strain in his clenched fist.

" _We_ happen to be the blighters trying to fix this mess!" Dorian stands, flinging his staff to the ground with a rebounding thump. "If my methods do not please you, you're welcome to be torn to pieces next time!"

"Yeah, your methods shave pretty close to--"

"Enough!" Lavellan pushes in between them, hands wide as if she feared they'll fall upon each other. "Blessed Sylaise, _enough_. Bull, sit down. I need to see your shoulder."

Dorian looks away. His shoulders spasm, then settle, with an effort.

They're hurt and exhausted. Bull's lived for days with the smell of distant brine in his nose and the creaks of a humid wildwood a continent away in his ears.

"Dorian," she says. "Please see if you can find any firewood around the village. Don't go too far."

"As you wish." Crouching, Dorian picks up his dropped staff and strides off between the houses.

Bull takes the seat on the bench that Dorian left empty.

Lavellan washes the scratches on his arm, smears elfroot and dawn lotus onto the bruises where his armour absorbed the claw slashes, all in silence. Eventually, Sera returns, Harding's advance scout in tow. The wagons should arrive before nightfall.

Bull doesn't so much excuse himself as simply wander out. He vaults a stone wall separating an apple orchard from a fallow meadow.

The main branch of the river flows serenely below the bluff to the northwest. Scarlet blossoms of embrium are scattered among the grass. Finding a spot of good, smooth ground, Bull lets himself fold onto his back, until all he can see are the waving stalks and the sallow blue curve of the sky.

The storm dithers in the north, the wind changing direction towards the fens Lavellan's map shows out from their position. He tries to let that fade. The earth smells warm and loamy. Easy to farm, he figures, with his dearth of knowledge on the topic.

These fields were someone's life. What do you do when you can't fit yours in a pack, strap on your axe and go?

He remembers how it was to be stuck in a place.

That's not right. He thought he could do good, make a difference. If he upset one more plot, uncovered one more informant, befriended one more doomed settlement, it'd slant the balance.

The faint grind of wagon wheels, the neighs of tired horses. The slow approach of Harding's group carries up in the clear air.

Time passes. He doesn't sleep, but he drifts. It's quiet here. Careless, to be alone. Vital, to only see the sky and the grass.

Dorian doesn't hide his footsteps. It'd be pointless, anyway: only Sera and Cole are silent enough to sneak up on Bull. He arranges himself on the ground, his leathers speckled with dust, the fine, thin wool of his robes more grey than white.

"I wouldn't," he says.

Bull muses a moment. Wishes, if only slightly, that he'd pick himself up and leave. "That's pretty broad."

"I wouldn't let you be killed." Dorian's bare hands are in his lap, left palm cupped loosely around the right, thumbs hooked together. "Even if it is morally repugnant to you."

Drawing up his good knee, Bull pushes his heel into the dirt. Grass rustles with the movement. "You're a twisted kind of guy sometimes, you know that?"

"Oh, with crystal clarity." Something dark strains in Dorian's laughter. "Ask anyone in Minrathous."

"Pretty far to go just for a second opinion."

A sigh from Dorian, blown into the breeze. How far would it carry?

"I'm not a soldier," he says then. "I know algebra, and I have a good guess--"

"That Harding would be counting our corpses now, back in the village." That was another lesson Bull tried to make stick: _You'll cock up. You'll lose people. If you let it stop you, you'll be the next name someone ties into a memorial cord._ Of course, Qunari don't bury their dead. Not with shovels or torches, anyway.

He tried to make it stick, so he had to cut Dorian short now.

"Something in that vein." Bull reads the weight falling from Dorian more in his inhalation than his words.

"Maybe. We'd have made them work for it, though."

"And that'd be enough?"

Some days, yes. When the wind came from the sea and cleared the jungle fumes from their heads, when they cracked a smuggling ring or booted the 'Vints back for a season.

"Dorian," Bull says, turning his seeing eye up without raising his head. Dorian looks back, the shadow of his curling hair on his brow, across his cheek. "It's a long story."

Nothing mars the sky when Bull breaks the glance. No bird, no cloud, no smoke. His boots scuffing the grass, bending the stalks and then letting them up again, Dorian shifts into a cross-legged pose, leans back on his hands.

"It is a beautiful day."

All the other things his answer could've been-- _I have time_ \-- _Nothing better to do, is there?_ \--wane slowly from the air.

"Sure is," Bull says, and settles back into the grass.

*

_\-- When the soul lies down in that grass,_  
_the world is too full to talk about._

\-- Rumi

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Toft for first squee and very productive writing sprints.


End file.
